


alternative frequencies

by twistedsky



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-04 21:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedsky/pseuds/twistedsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After high school, Bonnie finds solace somewhere outside of Mystic Falls. She runs into Tyler, and they help each other survive. Canonish through-4x15,  and a future fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	alternative frequencies

**Author's Note:**

> Basically almost everyone dies, but somehow there's still a quasi-happy ending.

  
It isn’t just the loss that destroys them, it’s the way they _deal_ with that loss.  
  
Elena disappears, and in her place is someone Bonnie simply doesn’t know anymore. She tries, oh, she _tries_ so hard to get through to her, to get her to turn back on the feelings, even if those feelings are _devastating,_ but she won’t, or she can’t, and eventually Bonnie can’t watch her best friend self-destruct anymore.  
  
Stefan and Damon circle around her like vultures, almost, waiting to snatch her up, and Bonnie can’t watch it.  
  
She gets into most of the colleges she applies to, and all she can think about is how much she wants to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.  
  
Tyler is already gone, and Caroline is off to see the world, because she isn’t ready to go to college until she can get Klaus to stop following her around.  
  
Jeremy is . . . Jeremy is gone, so it doesn’t matter. Bonnie thinks now that she’s not sure they would have all been able to leave him behind if he were still alive.  
  
She wishes she had that choice. She knows what she’d choose now.  
  
Matt is also just . . .Matt. He wants to leave this town as much as any of them, but he can’t. He’s trapped here, and Bonnie wishes he could come with her.  
  
He won’t, of course, even though she asks him.  
  
Instead, she’s off to USC to study screenwriting, and she’s absolutely alone.  
  
~~  
  
She’s not as alone as she thinks she is, in the end, because she sees a familiar face in some general education class the moment she walks in.  
  
It’s obvious that he sees her, but that he isn’t sure what to do, because they have eye contact, and Bonnie is _daring_ him to move.  
  
She knows he’s afraid, and that he’s running, and she’s not quite sure what the hell he thinks he’s doing in a college classroom.  
Tyler Lockwood has never much liked school, as far as she’s been able to tell.  
  
She sits down next to him, blocking his exit, warning him that they’ll talk about this when the class is over.  
  
There are fifteen people in this freshman writing class, and Bonnie Bennett thinks that _this_ is a bit too big of a coincidence.  
  
~~  
He introduces himself as someone else, and she realizes that he’s planned this out fairly well.  
  
He’s a hybrid, of course, so he probably just compelled enough people that it wouldn’t matter that Trevor Langley does not exist.  
  
She doesn’t want to know, of course, so she doesn’t ask.  
  
Instead, she gives him a firm glance that indicates he isn’t running off without talking to her, and when class ends, they walk quietly out of the underground classroom and sit near a water fountain, glancing around to make sure that  no one is listening.  
  
“It’s good to see you,” Bonnie says first, smiling at him. She’s surprised by how grateful she is that he’s alive. Klaus doesn’t deserve to win that, too.  
  
Tyler smiles ruefully at her. “I’m not sure I can say the same. I can’t get caught.”  
  
Bonnie nods. “I know, Ty. I know. Are you going to stay now?”  
  
Tyler considers her question for a moment. “Are you going to tell anyone I’m here?”  
  
“Of course not,” Bonnie tells him, without even needing to think about it. “Why would I endanger your life like that? Though—“  
  
“Though what?” Tyler stiffens.  
  
Bonnie smiles reassuringly, reaching out a hand to place on his arm. “If you want to get a message to Caroline, I can do that.”  
  
“I can’t,” he says immediately, sighing. Bonnie watches him carefully—watches the way his face contorts with anguish. He misses her.  
Bonnie wishes she could do something to help.  
  
“Okay,” she simply replies instead. “So, I guess we have two classes together.” The writing courses are linked with some ‘social issues’ course, which means they’ll be seeing each other quite a bit.  
  
Tyler smiles at that. “I guess things don’t change too much, do they?”  
  
Bonnie feels something in her release—she’d been worried he’d change classes, and he’s the only friend she has here, really.  
It’ll be nice not to be alone. She doesn’t realize yet that this secret will make her lonely in a different way,  but she won’t regret it.  
  
“So,” Bonnie starts to say. “Are we going to be friends or strangers?”  
  
She winces immediately, realizing she isn’t quite ready for the answer. It’s probably too much pressure to put on him, she thinks. She’s an idiot. She’s mentally berating herself when he interrupts her thoughts with a simple, “Friends.”  
  
Bonnie smiles. “So what other classes are you taking, Trevor Langley?”  
  
Tyler smiles at her, and pulls out a crumpled schedule from his pocket.  
  
She rather thinks they’re both grateful not to be alone.  
~~  
Later, they talk about things. About life, really.  
  
They talk about how alone he’s been the past few months, trying to go from place to place, and leave false trails, and cut his hair, and adopt a different clothing style, and all kinds of things that might make him seem less like Tyler Lockwood, and more like Trevor Langley.  
  
They talk about how hard it was in Mystic Falls—about the losses they’d all suffered, and the fact that there’s something _great_ about not being there anymore.  
  
It’s freeing.  
  
They don’t talk about Caroline, or Klaus. Not because they can’t, but because they don’t _want_ to.  
  
Klaus took everything from Tyler, and Caroline is the love of Tyler’s life, so Bonnie can understand that.  
  
And Tyler can understand her reticence to talk about Jeremy.  
  
It’s nice to have a friend.  
  
It’s nice to not be alone.  
  
~~  
  
“So why USC?” Bonnie asks one day, lounging on her bed, watching Tyler glare down at his laptop from his perch at her desk.  
  
They’re writing their first paper for their writing class, and she thinks he’s going to either scream or cry. The entry level writing class is known for being the most annoying class you have to take as an undergrad, and it’s living up to the horror stories they’ve heard.  
  
Tyler looks over at her and shrugs. “Good football team, even though I can’t risk being on it. Great weather.”  
  
Bonnie smiles at that. “I love the sunshine. It’s such a nice change from the doom and gloom of Mystic Falls.”  
  
Tyler smiles back at her, and she suddenly feels self-conscious. She sits up and leans back against her wall, facing her roommate’s side of the room. Her roommate who is in fact _rarely_ ever home, because she’s an architecture student, and they don’t even sleep as far as she can tell.  
  
“The sunshine is great,” Tyler agrees. “And—well, I didn’t think Caroline would come here. I probably should have gone to some small town somewhere, but I thought it’d be easier to hide in a huge place. And Caroline—Caroline is probably in Europe, or New York, or something like that.”  
  
Bonnie nods. “Yeah,” she says, looking down at her laptop. “This isn’t really her scene.”  
  
“Doesn’t seem like it’d be yours either,” Tyler says, and Bonnie tilts her head and looks back up at him with a questioning look. “I thought you’d be somewhere studying liberal arts. But—I’m glad you’re here.”  
  
Bonnie bites her lip to keep herself from smiling, and then stops once the desire to do so has passed. “Me too.”  
  
~~  
  
“I’m not going to a frat party on Halloween,” Bonnie tells her. “I’ve heard stories.”  
  
Tyler shakes his head at that, “But Bonnie, it’ll be fine. You’re a badass witch, and I’m a hybrid. I’m pretty sure we’ll be perfectly safe.”  
  
“Do you really want to go?” she asks him.  
  
He hesitates a moment, “No,” he says finally. “I just think we both need to get out more.”  
  
Bonnie smiles sadly at him. “I think we’re okay.”  
  
“Can we at least get drunk?”  
  
“Some things never change,” she says, patting his shoulder absently. “Okay.”  
  
She thinks he needs this—he needs to relax, and just _be_ for a while.  
  
And, maybe, she needs it too.  
  
~~  
  
“You still can’t hold your alcohol,” Tyler says with a laugh, looking at her fondly.  
  
Bonnie feels herself blush, but she might just be as drunk as he says she is.  
  
He’d pulled her to the on-campus bar, compelling the guy outside to give them both wristbands, and then they’d walked down the stairs to a fairly nice place.  
  
This was his compromise between staying in and doing nothing, and going to a party and getting completely wasted.  
  
Several drinks later, Bonnie is animated and laughing, and _enjoying_ herself.  
  
It’s just _nice._ Tyler stares away a cute guy that’s looking at Bonnie, but she doesn’t even notice.  
  
Bonnie leans in to whisper in Tyler’s ear. “I have to pee.”  
  
He laughs at that, and walks her over to the restroom, waiting outside for her to finish.  
  
When she comes back out, she’s all smiles. She leans in to hug him tightly, burying her head in his chest. “Thank you for being my friend.”  
  
Tyler hugs her back and says, “Thank you for being mine.”  
  
He pays their tabs, even though she insists on paying her own, and he takes her back to his place, plopping her on his couch and putting in the movie she’d said she’d wanted to watch instead of going out.  
  
“Okay, we’re going to watch Captain America so that you can stare at Chris Evans’ ass, okay?”  
  
Bonnie giggles at, leaning her head into Tyler’s shoulder. “Sebastian Stan isn’t so bad too look at either, Ty.”  
  
“I don’t know. I think I might be more of a Chris Evans guy,” Tyler says, and she laughs.  
  
“Everyone’s a Chris Evans guy,” Bonnie says with a soft sigh. She falls asleep soon after, and even when she wakes up the next morning with a slight hangover, she’s really happy they went out.  
  
She looks at Tyler, who is making her breakfast, and surprising her with the fact that he can actually cook, and she thinks he needed it as much as she did.  
  
~~  
  
“Caroline’s coming to visit me,” Bonnie tells Tyler one day, afraid that he’s going to freak out and leave the moment she does.  
  
She sees him almost start to panic, and then reach for her hand, which is sitting between them, and she lets him.  
  
He seems to settle after that. “For how long?”  
  
“A few days. Klaus might follow her. I—“ she hesitates. “If you don’t want to run now, I think we can hide you, for a few days. I can do a glamor, in case he happens to see you, and maybe you could lay extra low for a few days, and I’ll try to distract them as much as possible?”  
  
Tyler breathes in deeply, and squeezes her hand. “Thanks, Bonnie. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”  
  
Bonnie smiles slightly. “I could—I could maybe even keep Klaus distracted enough for you to see Caroline?”  
  
Tyler lets go of her hand at that, and she nearly kicks herself. “Please,” he says softly, and she feels her heart break for him.  
  
~~  
  
In the end, they don’t risk it.  
  
They can’t risk it, really.  
  
Klaus is practically tied to Caroline the entire time she’s in Los Angeles, and Bonnie wants to stab him in the face.  
  
It wouldn’t do much, but it would make her terrible happy.  
  
She wonders if one day all of her practicing will pay off, and she’ll be strong enough to take him down without hurting anyone else.  
  
Caroline is in the shower on the last day of her stay when Klaus finally talks to her. He’s been lurking, and she’s been nervous that he’d somehow figure things out. She’d cleansed her room of anything that might even _smell_ like Tyler in preparation for this.  
  
She opens her room door and stares Klaus down. “You’re not invited.”  
  
“Your roommate said otherwise,” Klaus says, walking straight past her.  
  
She feels a deep hatred coil in her stomach and she clenches at his insides, enjoying the way he crumples to the floor, even though she knows it’s only temporary.  
  
“Get out,” she says, looking down the hall to make sure no one will see her fling him right back outside of the room. “And don’t go near Chelsea again, or I swear I’ll—“  
  
Klaus has the audacity to laugh at her. “You’ll what? She’ll already be dead. Or, maybe I’ll turn her. That might be mildly entertaining.”  
  
“Leave her alone,” Bonnie says.  
  
Klaus simply shrugs at her. “I might, depending on how bored I get.”  
  
Bonnie wonders how she can hate him so much. It consumes her, almost, until she thinks of Caroline, and Tyler, and Chelsea. There  
are people who still need her to protect them. “Why can’t you just leave us all alone?”  
  
“I have my reasons,” Klaus says with one of those disgusting smiles that she wants to rip off his face.  
  
“You’re a psychopath,” she says, and she watches the grin slip from his face.  
  
Later, she’ll regret this, when Chelsea comes to the door that night, telling her she’s forgotten her keys, and Bonnie realizes she’s been compelled to kill her.  
  
Bonnie isn’t even particularly close to her roommate, but it hurts her to stake Chelsea.  
  
After, when she’s hidden the body and made sure it’ll be found in a few days, she cries and calls Tyler.  
  
She moves out the next week, and Tyler makes sure the police note Chelsea’s death as an accident with a bit of compulsion.  
  
~~  
  
“I thought we’d escaped him,” Bonnie says softly, curled in a ball on the couch in Tyler’s apartment. “I shouldn’t have taunted him.”  
  
“It isn’t your fault,” Tyler tells her, sitting next to her, and putting his arm around her. “That’s just what Klaus does. _This isn’t your fault.”_  
  
She knows that, deep down, but Tyler has to repeat several more times over the next weeks before she believes it.  
  
She never fully does.  
  
“If you want,” Tyler offers quietly, “You can move in here. I have an extra bedroom.”  
  
Bonnie opens her mouth to say no, but hears herself say yes instead.  
  
She moves in over Thanksgiving weekend.  
  
~~  
  
She wishes she could help Caroline, sometimes, but Caroline always tells her, with a laugh, that she’s handling it, that it’s okay, that _Klaus won’t win._  
  
Bonnie doesn’t know that she believes that, but she always accepts Caroline’s words and puts on a brave face for Caroline during their skype calls—which Tyler is carefully absent from the apartment during, except one time, when he comes back early, and  
Bonnie’s eyes go wide.  
  
“Oh, is that your new roommate?” Caroline asks. Bonnie hadn’t told her about Chelsea, but instead had said she’d moved off campus so that she could feel more independent.  
  
Tyler laughs for some reason in the other room, and Bonnie knows Caroline can tell it’s a male laugh with her vamp hearing, and Bonnie cringes when Caroline exclaims.  
  
“Are you living with a _guy?”_  
  
“Of course not. It’s my roommate’s boyfriend.”  
  
Caroline is disappointed at that, but she seems to at least want to pretend to buy it, so Bonnie lets it go, and ends the conversation, claiming she has too much homework.  
  
She bounces away from her bed and opens the door to the living room and glares at Tyler, who looks back at her innocently. “What?”  
  
“I was skyping with Caroline,” Bonnie says simply, and Tyler winces.  
  
“Oh. I’m so sorry.”  
  
“You could have ruined everything,” Bonnie says, walking over and lightly slapping at his shoulder. “I will not be the reason why you end up dead.”  
  
Tyler puts his hands on her shoulders and looks her in the eyes. “I’m going to be okay, Bonnie. Everything’s going to be okay. And if anything happened to me, it would be my fault, not yours. Okay?”  
  
Bonnie raises an eyebrow. “Stop putting yourself at risk,” she says softly.  
  
Tyler smiles at her, then, and she feels herself relax slightly. “I will,” he promises, and she lets him pull her in for a hug.  
  
It’s good to have a friend, she thinks. Even one with a deathwish.  
  
~~  
  
She and Tyler have never been particularly close, but they’ve always been friends.  
  
In fact, he’d been her first kiss, at a party when they were thirteen, and he’d tasted like stolen beer and nutmeg, for some reason.  
  
Now, he is her lifeline, and she thinks sometimes that she might be his.  
  
~~  
  
They like to write together when they have papers due the next day(they both try to write in advance, but somehow the pressure of the day before is what gets the awful essays done).  
  
Bonnie plays music that Tyler pretends to hate, and Tyler throws pretzels at her that she tells him he’ll have to clean up later, and he does.  
  
Living together is surprisingly easy, and makes their friendship run even more smoothly than before.  
  
She can’t count the number of times she wakes up from a nightmare, and remembers that he’s in the next room, and she feels _safe._  
  
~~  
  
He doesn’t bring home girls, though she’s sure he thinks about it.  
  
Caroline and he are broken up, but they’re still in love, so she thinks he’s punishing himself by being alone.  
  
Bonnie dates, sometimes, on occasion, but it rarely gets past the coffee stage, and she never invites anyone over.  
  
She wonders if she’s gotten too used to not trusting people.  
  
She has few friends—mostly classmates, and people she can talk to when she comes across them, but she has no desire to talk to them outside of that.  
  
She talks to Matt, sometimes, who is now the manager of the Mystic Grill, because he’s become indispensable to the owner. At least he has that, she thinks. She and Caroline talk, but it’s becoming more difficult, because Caroline’s life is full of excitement, and Bonnie’s life is full of Tyler and secrets.  
  
The problem is, in the end, that she can’t exactly tell people she’s a witch, and even if she could, she’s not sure she would.  
  
There is a part of her that is terrified that if she makes more friends, they’ll simply be pawns in Klaus’s games. She doesn’t trust him to never visit her again.  
  
She daydreams, on occasion, of disappearing somewhere where Klaus can never find her again, and she can just be _happy._  
  
She tells Tyler this, and he gets it. “I wish we could,” he says wistfully, and Bonnie feels the intensity of her rage and hatred for Klaus, and she has to breathe slowly to get through it.  
  
“Maybe one day we’ll be able to,” she says, and she doesn’t quite believe it, but she wants to, desperately. She thinks that might be enough.  
  
~~  
  
They pass their first semester, and their writing class doesn’t kill them(and it is, in the end, just as bad as everyone has warned them).  
  
They stay up late the night after Bonnie finishes her last final, and then they celebrate, dancing around the apartment and playing their music a little bit too loud.  
  
Bonnie has long since cast a spell to keep any noise from escaping the apartment, in case the neighbors end up feeling curious and accidentally overhear something they shouldn’t.  
  
They watch bad reality television that Tyler claims to ‘accidentally’ DVR(the same shows Caroline had once gotten _Bonnie_ hooked on, she notices with a pang), and they settle into companionable mocking, laughing at the show on the screen.  
  
Bonnie doesn’t go home that winter break, and instead chooses to keep Tyler company.  
  
Tyler has no one, but Bonnie is insistent on making sure that he knows that he has her, that she is his friend, and that she isn’t going to leave him to his own loneliness.  
  
~~  
  
They go to a party held by a quasi-friend they’d made in their writing course on New Years, and drink more than they should, and exchange a kiss at midnight because everyone else has paired off and it would be weird if they didn’t. It doesn’t help that everyone they come in contact with thinks they’re just the most _adorable_ couple.  
  
Bonnie chooses not to think about that, and instead focuses on the kiss, and then her only thought is that he’s a much better kisser now than he was when they were thirteen.  
  
~~  
  
They survive the spring semester of their freshman year, and Bonnie can barely remember a time when Tyler wasn’t her closest friend.  
  
They take a trip to the grand canyon during spring break, and Bonnie and Tyler take silly photos no one but them will ever see, and it makes them both a little sad when they realize that, staring down at the camera.  
  
After, however, Bonnie stays in LA, while Tyler leaves a few crumbs in places he’s never been before, in case Klaus still cares to look for him.  
  
When Bonnie calls Caroline, it’s clear that Klaus is still bloodthirsty. Caroline asks her to go on vacation with her, and Bonnie imagines the awkward silences, and the fact that Klaus will never leave them alone, and says no with little regret.  
  
When Tyler comes home, she doesn’t tell him, and they spend the rest of the summer at the beach.  
  
~~  
  
Bonnie finds herself gradually noticing things about Tyler that she doesn’t want to.  
  
She notices the way his smile makes her feel _warm_ , and the way that he doesn’t wear a shirt when he comes back from his run in the morning, and the way that she’s an awful friend for being attracted to him.  
  
There’s a lot wrong with it.  
  
Caroline is her friend, and Tyler is her friend, and yet—she finds herself wishing, sometimes, that she could be able to feel more for him without the baggage that comes with it. Or the guilt, for that matter.  
  
~~  
  
She ignores her feelings for Tyler fairly well, forgetting about them most of the time, when she can help it, until they’re ready to graduate.  
  
They’ve drifted closer and closer—they live together, they go grocery shopping together(Tyler loves food, whether he _needs_ to eat it or not), and they’re best friends in all but name.  
  
At least until Tyler _calls her_ his best friend, one day, when he’s introducing her to some friend of his that came over to study for a final, and she lights up.  
  
It’s nice to know that people care the same way about you that you do about them.  
  
Bonnie hates to be insecure, but there are moments when she feels like she can never quite live up to Elena and Caroline, whose shadows she’s been trapped in for _years._  
  
She makes it to graduation day, still glowing happily about the fact that she’s getting a degree in something she likes, and that she’s not alone.  
  
She doesn’t like to think about the fact that Tyler is probably going to leave now, and she’ll never see him again.  
  
They haven’t talked about it yet. His degree is in business, so he could do what he wants anywhere. Bonnie isn’t sure he knows what he wants—isn’t sure that he wants much of anything, except to distract himself from the fact that he has eternity, and much of his near future won't involve the girl he loves more than anything.  
  
It’s that, also, that stops Bonnie from letting herself go from her crush to _love._  
  
She isn’t a fool.  
  
She goes to the main ceremony, and is sad that Tyler can’t make it—because if her dad or mom recognizes him, this could be a mess, and it's not worth the risk.  
  
She can’t trust anyone with this secret, it seems.  
  
She goes to the ceremony for her major, too, and is happy to see Tyler at the edge of the crowd. She goes to his, too, because her parents are back at the hotel she’d insisted they stay at in order to keep them away from her apartment with Tyler.  
  
She hasn’t once let them visit—but they hadn’t asked, either. But this is her graduation, and she’s incredibly happy to see them there, but they understand that the moments afterwards are for her and her friends. In this case, her and Tyler.  
  
It’s funny how someone becomes your anchor in the world, the thing that keeps you steady and in the right place, even though there’s a chance they’ll have to cut and run at any moment.  
  
Bonnie thinks it’s nothing short of a miracle that Klaus hasn’t discovered his whereabouts. Bonnie thinks it helps that she keeps Caroline away from Los Angeles, and that they rarely talk anymore.  
  
She knows that Caroline would never forgive her if Tyler ended up dead because Bonnie missed her too much, and so Bonnie lets it be.  
  
Some sacrifices, after all, are necessary.  
  
~~  
  
The morning of the day after graduation, after Bonnie’s parents are firmly on a plane back to Mystic Falls, Bonnie and Tyler go to Disneyland.  
  
It’s a wonderful day, even though it’s hot and crowded, but they go on more rides than Bonnie bothers to keep count of, and take pictures with as many actors-as-Disney-characters as they possibly can.  
  
Tyler holds her hand most of the day, and she doesn’t question it.  
  
He kisses her while they’re on the It’s a Small World ride, and she kisses him back.  
  
She doesn’t ask why, doesn’t question anything, just lets it happen.  
  
It’s nice, sometimes, to not have to question everything, and that is quite possibly one of her favorite things about Tyler, who makes things easy, and makes her laugh, and makes her want to climb him like a tree(but that’s a different story).  
  
When they get home, he tells her that he wants her, and that he cares about her deeply, and wants to be with her, and she kisses him, cutting off a stream of words she probably wouldn’t be able to believe anyway. Not yet, anyway.  
  
~~  
  
They have sex the first night—he comes hard inside of her, and she blissfully comes down from her first non-self-provided orgasm, and kisses away his questions about the blood on the sheets between them.  
  
She replaces them the next day, and he doesn’t ask again, though he’s twice as tender the next time it happens, and she feels him fall for her with each kiss and caress.  
  
It terrifies her.  
  
~~  
  
“If you ever get a chance to be with Caroline,” Bonnie says early into their relationship, “I need you to promise me that you won’t let me get in the way.”  
  
Tyler looks at her in shock at her words, and shakes his head. “Bonnie, don’t try to play the martyr, it doesn’t end well.”  
  
“I just want you to promise me that,” Bonnie says firmly. “I need to know you won't let some misguided loyalty keep you away from her. I need to know that I won’t be the reason why soulmates are kept apart,” she says with a rueful smile, that Tyler promptly kisses away.  
  
She pulls away, nearly breathless. “Promise me,” she says.  
  
He puts his hands on either side of her face and looks into her eyes. “I promise you that if I get the chance to be with Caroline,” he says with mock seriousness, “That I will be with her.”  
  
Bonnie smiles at that, and leans her head forward to lean it against Tyler’s. “Thank you.”  
  
It’s a lie, but somehow she doesn’t know that.  
  
~~  
  
Caroline _dies,_ and it’s the one thing they don’t expect.  
  
They don’t expect some hunter to just _kill_ her, though the bloodshed that Klaus unleashes upon a poor little town in Maine makes Bonnie sick to think about it.  
  
They mourn, first and foremost, and Bonnie starts to wonder how exactly her life is the way it is, that she loses everyone, and nothing can ever just end _well._  
  
A benefit of having friends who are mostly vampires should be that they won’t die before you.  
  
It’s simply a technicality that they’re already dead to begin with.  
  
At first, Bonnie feels guilty, as if somehow her betrayal is the reason why Caroline is dead, but that makes no sense, as Tyler tells her, over and over again, despite the fact that Caroline is dead and his heart is broken.  
  
(Somehow, she can never quite accept that Tyler loves _her,_ and this doesn’t help.)  
  
~~  
  
It’s only been two months since graduation, and Bonnie isn’t sure what happens next, so when Tyler asks her if she wants to go to Seattle with him, she says yes without hesitation, and suddenly they’re living in a two story house with a beautiful view.  
  
She gets a job in advertising, and writes screenplays in her spare time—somehow that dream doesn’t seem necessary anymore. She doesn’t _want_ it the same way, she thinks, that most people do.  
  
Tyler tells her he loves her on a Saturday, three months after they move to Seattle, and she cries and locks herself in the bathroom.  
  
He sits outside the entire time, talking to her quietly, and it helps.  
  
She wonders when she started to feel so broken—she doesn’t know how to trust anyone, and she doesn’t know how to love anymore, and she feels lost as often as she feels happy.  
  
She doesn’t say I love you back. At least, not yet.  
  
~~  
  
She throws herself into magic. She gets dark, sometimes, but Tyler is there to pull her back into the light, and anchor her sanity carefully.  
  
She’s powerful. Too powerful, probably, for her own good. But she always has been.  
  
She searches far and wide for a way to get rid of Klaus, and one day she finds it.  
  
She tells Tyler this, and he looks at her with such awe that she almost tells him she loves _him._ She doesn't though, and simply accepts his hug.  
  
~~  
  
Klaus appears without her calling him, as if somehow her digging into ways to kill him has summoned him, and when Tyler appears to defend her, she gives Klaus a warning glance.  
  
Tyler will not die today.  
  
Klaus, ever the sociopath, grabs her, biting his wrist and feeding her blood before she manages to throw him several yards away. She’d throw him further, but she isn’t done with him yet.  
  
“What kind of game do you think this is?” she asks, her mouth bloody and her heart racing.  
  
“It’s a warning, dear,” he says, lifting himself off the ground. “If you don’t stop, I won’t just kill you, I’ll turn you.”  
  
Bonnie clenches her magical fist, shattering most of the bones in his legs, forcing him to the ground. “Your reign of terror stops now.”  
  
She chants then, invoking magic she’s never touched before, magic she shouldn’t under any other circumstances, and she watches dispassionately as Klaus falls to the ground.  
  
His body is frozen now, forever, but his mind is there, stuck in its own cruelty.  
  
“What have you done?” Tyler asks, and she turns to look at him, and almost breaks at the look on his face.  
  
“I couldn’t let him hurt anyone else,” she says, before collapsing on the ground.  
  
Tyler comes over to comfort her, and she lets him hold her as she sobs.  
  
She cries for everything that’s happened—for all the innocent blood shed, and the lives lost.  
  
She wonders if anyone could ever possibly make things right.  
  
She supposes she’ll have to try.  
  
~~  
  
The sex is intense after that—she’s hungry for him and emotional, and she _loves_ him so much, more than she has any right to.  
  
After, when they’re lying in bed, she curls up against him, and decides to tell him in the morning, so that it won’t be about Klaus, or about sex.  
  
~~  
  
The morning comes.  
  
“I love you,” she says softly.  
  
“I love you too,” he says, and she wonders if things will actually be okay now.  
  
She hopes, desperately, that they can be.  
  
~~  
  
“I opened a door,” she realizes soon. “The magic I used to get rid of Klaus—“who has since been buried as far deep underground as possible. “it was dark,” she tells him. “I can’t do this anymore.”  
  
“Are you giving up magic?” he asks her, without judgment.  
  
“Maybe I should,” she says.  
  
~~  
  
They start to watch their time together slip away—she may be aging incredibly slowly, but she will die soon, at least in comparison to him.  
  
He can’t ask her to turn for him though, to give up her human life for him.  
  
She can’t ask him either, because there’s too much history, too much _wrongness_ about being a vampire for a witch.  
  
She imagines, sometimes, that they could be together forever.  
  
She think she loves him enough for forever(and he tells her he does).  
  
They’re stuck, she realizes.  
  
~~  
  
The decision is soon taken out of their hands, when Tyler heals a nasty gash on her head with his blood, and the next day she gets in a car accident.  
  
There are no more choices now, except that of whether she’ll drink human blood, and complete the transition.  
  
~~  
They sit together, on their bed, and Bonnie wonders what she’ll do, who she’ll choose to be.  
  
He reaches out and takes her hands, holding them gently.  
  
“Stay with me?” he asks.  
  
She realizes then that there is only one answer to that question.  
  
Without hesitation, she breathes it out.

**Author's Note:**

> Bonnie and Tyler go to USC because it has a lot of fountains, and it's far away from Mystic Falls.


End file.
